Trump has a big problem with a key voting block

Donald Trump may be beating Joe Biden in recent polling but there are signs the former president is in trouble with a key demographic he will need to win in 2024 according to a new poll. So which voting block has soured on Trump?

Polling data released in March from Harvard's Center for American Political Studies (CAPS) and Harris Insights and Analytics found that the former president saw a major dip in support from those between 18 to 24 since December 2023. 

Collectively referred to as Generation Z, the polling found only 35% of this crucial voting cohort said they would choose the former president over Biden in November. This was a major drop and ended a trend of increasing support. 

Newsweek reported that the same pollsters found that 48% of Gen Z voters backed the former president over Biden in December 2023 but the figure slipped to 43% in January before seeing an increase to 55% in February. 

Before December, Harvard CAPS and Harris defined the country’s youngest voters as those between the ages of 18 to 34, which included a portion of Millenials. Support by this group for Trump remained in the low 40s. 

Support for Trump over Biden in 2024 among the country’s youngest voters only dipped below 40% twice in 2023 according to the data from Harvard CAPS and Harris, once in July when it hit 39% and once in September when it hit 38%

"There has been considerable discussion about how well Trump is doing among younger voters," Seton Hall University politics professor and author of The Generational Gap in American Politics Patrick Fisher, explained to Newsweek.

"The 35 percent who supported him in March is much more in line with what you would expect,” Fisher added. But how could the former president’s dwindling support among younger voters affect him in the general election?

Newsweek noted that the country’s younger voters played an important role in the 2020 election and were credited with helping Biden beat Trump. Young voters have also been a long-time dedicated voting bloc for the Democratic Party. 

Both Biden and Trump captured new voters in 2020 according to Pew Research Center, and among the most important were those aged under 30 who had not voted in either of the previous two elections according to the market research firm. 

However, Biden led Trump 59% to 33% with younger voters whereas Trump led Biden 55% to 42% among new and irregular voters aged 30 and over. The youngest voters in the United States also broke for Biden at a much higher rate. 

“Voters in the youngest adult generations today – Generation Z (those ages 18 to 23 in 2020) and the Millennial generation (ages 24 to 39 in 2020) – favored Biden over Trump by a margin of 20 percentage points,” Pew explained. 

While Trump did make an 8-point gain with Millennial voters over his 2016 performance, Biden still captured the vast majority of support from young voters, which helped Biden secure his victory over Trump in the 2020 election. 

Interestingly, Patrick Fisher noted that it is still possible for the former president to take the White House back from Biden in 2024 with such low support from Generation Z. Fisher pointed out that 35% support among Gen Z may be enough to put Trump over the top. 

"If he is getting 55 percent of the 18-24 vote found in the February survey, this would indicate that Trump is winning in a landslide," Fisher said. However, he doesn’t think that a landslide victory is in the former president’s future. 

"Trump may win in 2024, but given the highly polarized nature of American politics today it is highly unlikely that he is winning in a landslide,” Fisher explained, but only time will tell which way the country’s youngest voters end up swinging in 2024. 

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